Over the years, considerable effort has been devoted to the development of technology for producing polyimide foams. Such materials are generally produced by forming a polyimide precursor, usually an essentially equimolar mixture of a lower alkyl ester of a tetracarboxylic acid and one or more primary diamines, and subjecting a bed or body of this polyimide precursor mixture to a temperature sufficient to cause the development of a foamed polymer structure through the generation and evolution of gaseous material within the body of the precursor. See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,153,783, 4,296,208, 4,305,796, 4,439,381 and Re. 30,213. Although the foaming operation may be performed in thermal ovens or by use of dielectric heating, to date use of microwaving as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,305,796 and 4,439,381 has proven most successful.
Despite the intensity and magnitude of the efforts to improve upon the technology of polyimide foam production, a number of difficulties have defied solution. Chief among these has been the inability to achieve consistently high yields of useable foam from the polyimide precursor. As formed, the polyimide leaves the oven in the form of a "bun" which has a crust over its outer surface which must be cut away in order to expose the interior cellular mass of cured polyimide foam. Unfortunately, blow holes, striations and other physical defects are often encountered in the buns, which means that the defective zones within the bun must be trimmed away and discarded, often with a considerable loss of raw materials and plant throughput. Complicating the problem has been the erratic nature of these events--only after the bun had been made and trimmed can it be determined whether the production run has been successful or not. Moreover, successive runs conducted under apparently the same conditions may give rise to vastly different results. In one case the yield of specification grade foam may be reasonably good, yet in the very next run it may be unacceptably low.
A most worthwhile contribution to the art would thus be the discovery of a way of improving the yields of specification grade polyimide foam on a consistent basis from one run to the next. This invention is believed to fulfill this need.